Wednesday, 12 August 2009

What a difference a week makes; 168 little hours

At the end of one holiday it’s cliché to comment that one feels like another but… perhaps I should take two weeks out next time around. So what difference does a week really make? I’ll tell you; four films, two guinea pigs, a couple of days out and the BBC iPlayer… and I really regret the guinea pigs, though I had little say in the matter. However the BBC via their iPlayer enabled me to catch up on back episodes of The Street, and a week where I can watch a few films, all for the first time, could never be classed a write-off.

I have a weakness for American sports dramas though I am guilty of neither appreciating the sport nor understanding the rules. Baseball is a statistical cul-de-sac, rounders with a bigger bat, yet we have The Natural. Basketball is despite the points utterly pointless, yet we have Hoop Dreams - one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. American gridiron football yesterday provided me with Friday Night Lights. Living in the UK I can’t vouch for accuracy, but it felt real. It helps knowing that this particular film was based on a real life season of the Permian Panthers, the football team of Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. Elements are shot in a documentary style yet it also includes the formulaic father-living-on-past-glories and the cocky-yet-likable athlete who you know is going to come undone. Perhaps the best sports dramas are really human dramas. It’s rather like an intelligent compassionate love story set in Paris; I can’t vouch for accuracy but if it feels real it doesn’t make me feel so bad - sometimes quite the opposite.